Off the Top of My Head Online (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} otmh) wrote,@ 2006-08-04 15:23:00 |
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August 2, 2006 - Twenty Years Ago (Part IV: "Lives Forever")
So, to recap. Twenty years ago, I spent two weeks at a sort of bookworm summer camp laid on by the Johns Hopkins University. It was my first time away from home for any significant length of time, apart from stays with relatives. My stay was marked by partial starvation, harassment by marauding thugs, and the solidarity of two companions who were previously strangers to me. My recounting of these events might have led you to believe that the experience is primarily regretted these days.
That's not actually true. I have many fond memories - they just don't make stories as colorful as the not-so-fond ones. For instance, I haven't touched on the classes we attended - which were, after all, the reason we were all there - and that's a shame, because they were really quite good. The literature course included some great proto-scifi; it was the first time I'd read The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Frankenstein, the latter of which was considered pretty mature stuff for a group of pre-eighth-graders. In the classic film class I attended, we watched some great films, including High Noon and a film I still have a great love for today, Modern Times. (Some call Modern Times Charlie Chaplin's first talkie, but that's not really accurate - though it was the first movie with sound he appeared in, Chaplin himself didn't speak. His dialogue is presented with traditional silent movie dialogue cards.)
Hunger, headaches, and hassles aside, it was a solid academic experience, one that's left a mark - if, perhaps, not a huge one - on my intellectual life ever since. But was that alone really worth all the trouble? Well, maybe not, but there was one other payoff. You see, in a way, my mother was right all along.
When the time came for everyone to leave the College of the Atlantic, there were the usual exchanges of contact information before we all went our separate ways. The students (and faculty, for that matter) came from all over the state, and many of us would see each other again at various interscholastic functions - if we lived close enough for our schools to be in the same region. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case with me and my two roommates. John was from Gardiner, near the state's capital, and I forget where Kelly came from. Either way, neither was likely to run into a guy from Millinocket at any band festival or basketball tournament.
As is nearly always the case, our promises to stay in touch came to nothing. I'll admit right now that I'm the worst guy in the world at keeping in touch with people I don't see in person regularly. There are exceptions - and the Internet makes it easier - but usually I find myself just looking at a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen nowadays, and thinking, Hell, I don't have anything interesting to report anyway. The next thing I know, years have gone by, people have gotten married and moved to Italy, whatever. I lapsed into radio silence, so did everybody else, and life went on. I had a year left in middle school, and then high school hit like a speeding bus and the whole thing started to seem a bit silly in hindsight. It was a thing I had done, it hadn't quite gone according to plan, and that was that.
Or was it?
Five years later, I found myself starting my freshman (and, as it turned out, only, but that's another story) year at WPI. I knew no one. The one guy from my high school circle of friends who had gone there two years before was long gone, back to our hometown to consider the error of his ways. I was immediately attracted to the computers on campus. They were primitive affairs by modern standards, but the Internet, even in its stone-knives-and-bearskins pre-HTTP phase, seemed like magic to a kid from rural Maine. My hometown hadn't even had touch-tone dialing until I was halfway through high school.
I was sitting at one of the cigarette-stained Digital Equipment Corporation terminals near the Wedge one day, putzing around on the student mainframe, when one of the usernames in the long list of people who were logged in caught my eye: jtruss.
Huh, I thought. I used to know a guy named John Trussell. I wonder... nah. What are the odds?
I thought no more about it, except to repeat some variation on that thought whenever jtruss turned up in a user listing, for some time. During the idle week or so leading up to the start of classes, I struck up an acquaintanceship with an upperclassman named Stephe (pronounced "Steve" - "no V, no N," as his sigblock pointed out) who liked my style and my eagerness to learn the Right Way to Do Things on the campus computer systems. He lived in one of the apartments on campus with six other, like-minded non-freshmen, and a day or two before classes started he decided to take me over there and introduce me to the crew.
One of them was John Trussell. The John Trussell, my roommate from the College of the Atlantic, a charter member of the Federation of Lawful Humanoids. I think the first words out of my mouth when we were introduced, after we'd stared at each other in mild disbelief for a couple of seconds, were the Federation's defiant motto: "The Federation lives forever!"
We didn't lose touch again, even though I left WPI at the end of that school year. Over the next decade and a half, we stayed connected to the same web of friends, often in person, via the Miracle of the Internet when that wasn't possible. We shared a nice apartment in Waltham with MegaZone (often mentioned in these pages) for a couple of years, even, before the dot-com bust sent me back to Maine and he moved in with his girlfriend. They come up a couple of times a year. He remains one of my closest friends.
So Mom's After-School Special rhetoric was right after all. I had a great time. I made a friend for life. And I wouldn't have done it if some misguided soul hadn't decided that I was "gifted and talented" all those years ago. It was worth all the playground hassles. Worth being banned from bringing Del Monte Pudding Cups to school for my recess snack in first grade. Worth spending all that time in a basement classroom with the kookiest teacher ever hired by my local school district.
Not because of any academic achievment it led me to; my academic career has been, to put it generously, undistinguished.
No, in fact - because it led directly to my making friends, not only at the College of the Atlantic, but for the rest of my life. You see, not only did I meet John at CoA, I decided to attend WPI because of another program I had access to only because of my G&T label - a summer program run at the institute the previous year, in which I'd gotten my first taste of the online life, met a few people (who turned out to be friends of Stephe's), and primed the pump, so to speak, for everything that would follow when I returned to the school in the fall of 1991.
So there you are. Is there a lesson in all this? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not one of those people who believe that there's a lesson in everything. If there's anything to take away from the story, lesson or not, I'd say it's that you can never quite predict the consequences, good or bad, of anything that comes along - so, as the late Hunter S. Thompson said, buy the ticket, take the ride.
Oh, and there is one more thing:
The Federation lives forever!
So, to recap. Twenty years ago, I spent two weeks at a sort of bookworm summer camp laid on by the Johns Hopkins University. It was my first time away from home for any significant length of time, apart from stays with relatives. My stay was marked by partial starvation, harassment by marauding thugs, and the solidarity of two companions who were previously strangers to me. My recounting of these events might have led you to believe that the experience is primarily regretted these days.
That's not actually true. I have many fond memories - they just don't make stories as colorful as the not-so-fond ones. For instance, I haven't touched on the classes we attended - which were, after all, the reason we were all there - and that's a shame, because they were really quite good. The literature course included some great proto-scifi; it was the first time I'd read The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde and Frankenstein, the latter of which was considered pretty mature stuff for a group of pre-eighth-graders. In the classic film class I attended, we watched some great films, including High Noon and a film I still have a great love for today, Modern Times. (Some call Modern Times Charlie Chaplin's first talkie, but that's not really accurate - though it was the first movie with sound he appeared in, Chaplin himself didn't speak. His dialogue is presented with traditional silent movie dialogue cards.)
Hunger, headaches, and hassles aside, it was a solid academic experience, one that's left a mark - if, perhaps, not a huge one - on my intellectual life ever since. But was that alone really worth all the trouble? Well, maybe not, but there was one other payoff. You see, in a way, my mother was right all along.
When the time came for everyone to leave the College of the Atlantic, there were the usual exchanges of contact information before we all went our separate ways. The students (and faculty, for that matter) came from all over the state, and many of us would see each other again at various interscholastic functions - if we lived close enough for our schools to be in the same region. Unfortunately, this wasn't the case with me and my two roommates. John was from Gardiner, near the state's capital, and I forget where Kelly came from. Either way, neither was likely to run into a guy from Millinocket at any band festival or basketball tournament.
As is nearly always the case, our promises to stay in touch came to nothing. I'll admit right now that I'm the worst guy in the world at keeping in touch with people I don't see in person regularly. There are exceptions - and the Internet makes it easier - but usually I find myself just looking at a blank sheet of paper, or a blank screen nowadays, and thinking, Hell, I don't have anything interesting to report anyway. The next thing I know, years have gone by, people have gotten married and moved to Italy, whatever. I lapsed into radio silence, so did everybody else, and life went on. I had a year left in middle school, and then high school hit like a speeding bus and the whole thing started to seem a bit silly in hindsight. It was a thing I had done, it hadn't quite gone according to plan, and that was that.
Or was it?
Five years later, I found myself starting my freshman (and, as it turned out, only, but that's another story) year at WPI. I knew no one. The one guy from my high school circle of friends who had gone there two years before was long gone, back to our hometown to consider the error of his ways. I was immediately attracted to the computers on campus. They were primitive affairs by modern standards, but the Internet, even in its stone-knives-and-bearskins pre-HTTP phase, seemed like magic to a kid from rural Maine. My hometown hadn't even had touch-tone dialing until I was halfway through high school.
I was sitting at one of the cigarette-stained Digital Equipment Corporation terminals near the Wedge one day, putzing around on the student mainframe, when one of the usernames in the long list of people who were logged in caught my eye: jtruss.
Huh, I thought. I used to know a guy named John Trussell. I wonder... nah. What are the odds?
I thought no more about it, except to repeat some variation on that thought whenever jtruss turned up in a user listing, for some time. During the idle week or so leading up to the start of classes, I struck up an acquaintanceship with an upperclassman named Stephe (pronounced "Steve" - "no V, no N," as his sigblock pointed out) who liked my style and my eagerness to learn the Right Way to Do Things on the campus computer systems. He lived in one of the apartments on campus with six other, like-minded non-freshmen, and a day or two before classes started he decided to take me over there and introduce me to the crew.
One of them was John Trussell. The John Trussell, my roommate from the College of the Atlantic, a charter member of the Federation of Lawful Humanoids. I think the first words out of my mouth when we were introduced, after we'd stared at each other in mild disbelief for a couple of seconds, were the Federation's defiant motto: "The Federation lives forever!"
We didn't lose touch again, even though I left WPI at the end of that school year. Over the next decade and a half, we stayed connected to the same web of friends, often in person, via the Miracle of the Internet when that wasn't possible. We shared a nice apartment in Waltham with MegaZone (often mentioned in these pages) for a couple of years, even, before the dot-com bust sent me back to Maine and he moved in with his girlfriend. They come up a couple of times a year. He remains one of my closest friends.
So Mom's After-School Special rhetoric was right after all. I had a great time. I made a friend for life. And I wouldn't have done it if some misguided soul hadn't decided that I was "gifted and talented" all those years ago. It was worth all the playground hassles. Worth being banned from bringing Del Monte Pudding Cups to school for my recess snack in first grade. Worth spending all that time in a basement classroom with the kookiest teacher ever hired by my local school district.
Not because of any academic achievment it led me to; my academic career has been, to put it generously, undistinguished.
No, in fact - because it led directly to my making friends, not only at the College of the Atlantic, but for the rest of my life. You see, not only did I meet John at CoA, I decided to attend WPI because of another program I had access to only because of my G&T label - a summer program run at the institute the previous year, in which I'd gotten my first taste of the online life, met a few people (who turned out to be friends of Stephe's), and primed the pump, so to speak, for everything that would follow when I returned to the school in the fall of 1991.
So there you are. Is there a lesson in all this? Maybe, maybe not. I'm not one of those people who believe that there's a lesson in everything. If there's anything to take away from the story, lesson or not, I'd say it's that you can never quite predict the consequences, good or bad, of anything that comes along - so, as the late Hunter S. Thompson said, buy the ticket, take the ride.
Oh, and there is one more thing:
The Federation lives forever!
